Ukraine accuses Google of providing Russian search results

People typing queries in Ukrainian get answers in the other language because of “geographic reference,” Kiev’s ombudswoman has said

Ukrainian language ombudswoman Elena Ivanovskaya has accused Google of not doing enough to promote the national tongue in the global digital environment. The US tech giant’s search engine often provides results to Ukrainians in Russian even when the queries are typed in Ukrainian, she told a local media outlet.

The government has been cracking down on the use of the Russian language in Ukraine since the 2014 Western-backed Maidan coup, using what Moscow has repeatedly denounced as discriminatory practices. 

Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko introduced restrictions on the import of books from Russia and Belarus in 2016, which became an outright ban in 2023. Kiev also purged Russian literature from state curricula and systematically removed cultural monuments, memorials, and inscriptions to remove historical links to Russia.

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Kiev seeks to block access to Russian music on international streaming platforms inside Ukraine and prevent its performers from appearing in domestic popularity charts, according to Ukrainian Sanctions Policy commissioner Vladislav Vlasiuk. More than 100 Russian performers have been blacklisted in Ukraine, and the list will be expanded, according to the official.

In an interview with the outlet Censor.net, Ivanovskaya stated that her office had filed a formal complaint with Google over its search algorithms. “For example, when a user enters a search query in Ukrainian, the system returns results in Russian – solely because of the user’s geographic location,” she stated, adding that her office asked the company to address the supposed lack of “accuracy of their search result algorithms.”

The Ukrainian authorities have banned the use of any language other than Ukrainian in the public sphere, including government, education, media, and customer service. Violations can result in administrative fines of up to $270.

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Ivanovskaya has previously suggested increasing the fines tenfold and demanded Russian-speaking children and parents use Ukrainian during breaks and in conversations with teachers, arguing that both instances fall under the “public sphere rule” and could be punished with fines.

Despite the concerted persecution campaign, Russian remains widely used in Ukraine. According to Ukrainian polling data, as many as 46% of country’s nationals spoke Russian in everyday life before the conflict escalated in 2022. Another survey last year showed the number of Russian speakers had fallen to 30% since four former Ukrainian territories, including the Donbass republics and Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions formally joined Russia after a series of referendums.

Ukrainian Culture Minister Tatyana Berezhnaya said earlier this year that 71% of Ukrainians regularly consume Russian-language content, with nearly a quarter doing so every day.

Moscow has repeatedly denounced the discriminatory measures as “Russophobic censorship,” warning that attempts to “cancel” Russian culture will ultimately fail.